Okkervil River- Black Sheep Boy

It's strange and beautiful how music can affect you. Hearing the right song at the right time has made me do anything from miss the exit I was supposed to take, tell a complete stranger I think she's beautiful at a concert, or finally get up the wherewithal to shave and do some laundry during one of my depressive phases. Yet I generally find myself resistant to what Bradford Cox of Deerhunter once referred to as “emotionally manipulative” music. The sort of stuff that attempts, purposefully or otherwise, to make you feel something, whether it be despair, euphoria, anger, or what have you. For instance, I was listening to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea the other day at work, and for whatever reason the latter half of it really got to me; meanwhile, I'm dreading finally listening to the new Arcade Fire album because I find their albums draining (in a good way) due to their full force assault on my emotions.

Still, when I stumble on a band who have this kind of effect on me, it's always a welcome thing. The Stage Names was my introduction to Okkervil River, and it was one of the many excellent albums from 2007. My only foreknowledge of the band was a comment by Lou Reed at some kind of MTV awards show, where he was asked what modern bands he liked. I'm pretty sure it was around the time Black Sheep Boy came out, since this was definitely the album that made their name. Anyway, I can see Reed liking this band. There's a classicist, straight-ahead rock 'n roll feel to their music that would appeal to him. Even when they're bringing in stately horns ('A Kind And A Queen'), orchestra players ('In A Radio Song'), or going for acoustic stuff that wouldn't be out of place on a Mountain Goats album (the title track), you still feel that this band is not so much classic rock a la the Rolling Stones as they are a prefix-less version of rock. Akin to the third (and especially) fourth Velvet Underground albums, now that I think about it.

Okkervil River certainly aren't indie rock as most people would define it despite being on an indie label. Frontman Will Sheff even stated, during an interview with Relix about Pavement's reunion, that he actually hated them for awhile because of all the bands who sprung up in their wake, with lazy, sloppy music and mumbled, meaningless lyrics. Sheff, though, is the kind of guy who will put work and time into his albums. Hence Black Sheep Boy, a concept album inspired by a song of the same name by Tim Hardin. Rest assured that, whether or not you try to piece together the story of the monstrous, tragic lead character and the love triangle he becomes involved in (at least, that's what I think is going on), you can still enjoy this album. As someone who enjoyedThe Stage Names but just couldn't quite fall in love with it (I like to call this “four-and-a-half-star-syndrome”), Black Sheep Boy is concrete proof that Okkervil River are a great band. You may not dig Sheff's voice at first, but as with, say, Conor Oberst, once you see his full range and spellbinding power, you understand what a deliberate and emotionally affective weapon it is. During my first listen, when the band hit the peaks on the dramatic 'For Real', I was finally sold on his voice.

As for the album, when the band hit those final peaks on the epic 'So Come Back, I'm Waiting', and he belts out “I'm waiting/I snort and I stamp” and then quiets down for “I'm waiting, you know that I am/
calmly waiting to make you my lamb”, I was fully sold on it. The main reason I like this over The Stage Names is that there's a stronger sense of discovery and songwriting playfulness here. The mellow country-rock of 'A Song Of Our So-Called Friend' could pass for a Bonnie 'Prince' Billy cover, 'A Glow' has a waltz-like lilt and dreamy school dance guitars, and the Spoon-like grooves and falsetto backing vocals on 'The Latest Toughs' make it one of the album's most immediate thrills. This is an album brimming with ideas and hooks, with a palpable feeling of fun to back up and juxtapose with the heavy/dark subject matter and sometimes smarty-pants lyrics. Hands up, how many people had to look up what a “diapason” was?

As with a good number of things in life, Lou Reed was right about Okkervil River, too. They're one of the few indie bands that no genre or buzzwords stick to other than “rock.” Then let me say: Black Sheep Boy is an outstanding album from one of the best (extant) rock bands. Highly recommended.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Album Of The Week: Okkervil River- The Stage Names

In a recent interview on Pitchfork, Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear remarked about how we can fall into the habit of downloading a bunch of music and not giving most of it a full chance if it doesn't catch us right away. This is as opposed to when we were younger and/or in the pre-Internet days, when we only had access to one album at a time since it's all we could afford. This caused "...[a] really cool thing...where you would be forced to only have that album because you couldn't just download a million more, and you may not have liked every song on it, but then as you started listening to it more and more you'd be like, 'Oh wait, I do like track nine.' You lived with an album, and that doesn't happen as much anymore."

Well, this is something I always think about when I'm going through my iTunes library to trim the fat of albums that I downloaded or borrowed from the local library but never got into. Certainly many albums will never click with you no matter how much you listen to them, but there are those that require some 'living with.' I kind of get the impression that this's the case for most people with Okkervil River. I know it was for me because The Stage Names didn't strike my fancy when I first downloaded it. There just didn't seem to be enough going on: it sounded too classicist and simple, I suppose is how I might've phrased it at the time. But then a friend made a mix CD for me with a single by Okkervil River called 'The President's Dead' and I wound up buying The Stage Names to force myself to give the band another chance.

Ironically I think it's the band's classicism and simplicity that grabbed me on subsequent listens. It's pretty telling that Lou Reed is a fan of the band since Okkervil River's sound is very much a Loaded-era Velvet Underground style, though I would qualify this by saying they don't actually sound much like the Velvets and they aren't so much "classic rock" as "rock." As with many of the albums that I would consider the best of this decade (and The Stage Names belongs on that list), it's the songwriting that sets it apart. It may take you a couple listens to get past the fact that Okkervil River are "just" a rock band, but by that point the songs will have begun to sink in.

The album's best songs are probably the first and last: 'Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe' sets the tone for the dramatic, pseudo-conceptual album (loaded as it is with literary and cinematic allusion), complete with soaring choruses, while 'John Allyn Smith Sails' is a masterpiece of a closer that sneakily finishes up with one-half of a cover of 'Sloop John B.' In between is the surprisingly clever 'Plus Ones' (which mentions a raft of songs with numbers in their titles, such as '99 Luftballoons' and '8 Miles High') and the appropriately named 'Title Track', which is one of those swaggering penultimate songs that really demonstrate the band has confidence and a sense of grandeur up their sleeves.

I still haven't got around to The Stand Ins, this album's partner, but The Stage Names is excellent enough to stand on its own merits. It may not be the most inventive, experimental, fresh, or "hip" album of the 00s, but Okkervil River make simple, excellent rock with brains and balls. And sometimes, that's all you need.

Video: Okkervil River- Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe

Ignore the pseudo-concept that ties together The Stage Names and The Stand-Ins and enjoy the constantly underrated music that Okkervil River makes. I don't know what it is about this band, but I always find their albums underwhelming until the songs begin to burrow into me. Oh well, here's a video for the first song off of The Stage Names.